Microsoft's New Android Keyboard Cuts Down On App-Jumping

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Microsoft's New Android Keyboard Cuts Down On App-Jumping

Microsoft

We used to call ginormous phones “phablets,” and they were novelties. Now they’re just phones. And as big as they are—the Nexus 6 may have been too big—everyone's making devices with ever bigger screens, and people are buying them.

This makes sense. After all, everyone's spending more time on mobile devices and less time on computers. As phones increasingly replace desktops and laptops, the need for a larger screen for typing, reading, surfing, streaming, and gaming becomes really important. A bigger phone can also accommodate a bigger battery, and obscure less of the screen beneath your fat thumbs as you're typing and swiping.

But even the biggest smartphone screen is more cramped than a flight on Spirit Air, making things that would be multi-window tasks on a computer very tedious. To share a link, a contact, or a chunk of text, you’ve got to hop, skip, and jump between apps, poking and dragging to make a selection, revisit the messaging app, and paste your info there.

WIRED

The problem, says Steve Won, a senior designer at Microsoft Office, is everything is siloed. “On a small screen, there isn’t a scalable way to run apps side by side. The interesting UX challenge for the small screen is breaking down these silos and having what the user needs readily available,” he says.

Microsoft has a slick solution to this problem: the Microsoft Hub Keyboard, a software keyboard that eliminates a lot of that app-hopping. And what's really interesting is Microsoft created it for Android devices, not its own Windows 10 Mobile devices.

The Hub Keyboard, which is free at the Google Play Store, offers handy shortcuts and tunnels into other apps without being overly complex. Above the keys, which can be long-pressed to bring up punctuation and numbers, lies a strip of options akin to the Microsoft Office Ribbon. It offers five choices: View your clipboard archive for easy pasting, search your OneDrive documents for easy linking, type in the name of a contact for easy sharing, translate your text to a different language, or disable those features to enter autocorrect mode.

Instead of jumping between your browser and your contact list and Google Translate, you access data within other apps through the keyboard. This keyboard follows you from app to app, so there's far less finagling involved to share a contact or a link. (Other perks: Through its inline translation feature, I discovered that the Slovak word for pepperoni is “feferónky,” which is now my new favorite word.)

The Hub Keyboard is still a work in progress, but it's off to a great start. At the moment, the keyboard’s functionality is limited. You can’t use it as a swipe keyboard, you must disable its unique menu to enable autocorrect, and it still needs support for third-party apps (Dropbox and Google Drive in addition to OneDrive, for example) to reach its full potential. But there’s plenty of room for it to grow into an essential part of the mobile experience.

Before it can become truly essential, though, Hub Keyboard must work on other mobile platforms. Microsoft wouldn’t say whether that's in the pipeline—it won't even say if it will become the default keyboard for Windows Mobile 10—but Redmond wants to use the next month or so as one hell of a suggestion box. “In the coming weeks, a number of new features will be introduced,” Won says. “We are very excited to hear feedback and evolve the product.”

Hub Keyboard is yet another example of a growing trend in the mobile space. In the past year or so, Apple and Google have been razing the walls between apps, surfacing information within them in core OS services. Increasingly, you don’t have to open an app to see what’s in it; you can use system search tools and voice assistants to access that data.

But what makes the Hub Keyboard so unique and promising is that it helps us use our phones more like we use our computers: crazily, quickly, and with plenty of shortcuts. It’s the direction we’ve been headed for years, without the interface or input device to do it right. That may be about to change, or at least take a big step in the right direction.